RICKIE LEE JONES @ THE MAHAIWE, 10/30/09

GREAT BARRINGTON, MASS. – You probably didn’t want to be in Rickie Lee Jones’ band at the Mahaiwe Performing Arts Center on Friday night, but it was distinct treat to be in the audience.

Jones has always been a bit of a, well, um, eccentric performer, but Friday she was working to beat the band. Literally.

What makes Jones so magnetic is that she is very, very alive to the moment onstage, but that also makes her a wee bit testy, and she harangued keyboardist Alan Okuye throughout the evening – pushing him to lay out, play quieter and occasionally even asking him to try different parts or instruments before flatly telling him to stop.

“Put that tambourine down,” she said during “Old Enough,” a track from her soon to be released “Balm in Gilead.”

Later she begged the band to find the pocket in “Gilead’s” “The Gospel of Carlos, Norman and Smith,” finally giving up with a wave of her hands.

Here’s the tickle, though. Few in the audience would have known there was anything amiss in the music if Jones hadn’t piped up. But her curious beatnik perfectionist streak is part of what makes her abundantly quirky music so special.

She began the night on guitar, doing her best distaff Furry Lewis and doling out classics like “Youngblood,” “Weasel and the White Boys Cool” and “The Last Chance Texaco” before wiggling deeper into her catalog and her own psyche.

She dotted the long set with selections from “Gilead” including the aforementioned pair, “Bonfires” and the remarkable “His Jeweled Floor,” which was draped in Prince-like falsetto from Okuye and frequent Joe Ely collaborator Joel Guzman.

Jones’ voice is not conventionally beautiful but it is drenched in emotion and a certain kind of soul. She sounds like a trumpet, all brass and volume one moment and muted sweetness the next.

That instrument made “Gilead’s” “Wild Girl” shimmer. Wow.

Eventually Jones, 54, moved over the piano, explaining that she basically wanted a more comfortable seat.

More classics followed, with “Horses,” “On Saturday Afternoons in 1963” and “We Belong Together” drawing a strong response from a crowd clearly hungrier for early material than Jones’ more challenging recent stuff.

But they got some of that, too, and “Lapdog” – from 2003’s “The Evening of My Best Day” – was as a top of the set highlight and “I Was There” – from 2007’s “The Sermon on Exposition Boulevard” – was a rare, perfect moment.

Jones knew it, too.

“There’s not one time that I do that song that it’s not really exciting for me,” she said as the performance passed into memory.

As long as you weren’t sitting next to her, it was just a wonderful thing.